This presentation was given at both Antwerp CALL 2010 and EUROCALL 2010, Bordeaux. There is also a podcast of the EUROCALL conference and a recording of the EUROCALL presentation.

This presentation is based on research conducted as part of my master’s dissertation in Applied Linguistics and ELT at King’s College, London (supervised by Dr. Nick Andon). The slides from the presentation are available to view here or download in PDF.

This year I attended the CALL journal’s bi-annual conference in Antwerp, Belgium. The conference is held at the University of Antwerp in the Linguapolis department and was organised by Joseph Colpaert, the general editor of the CALL Journal. There were some fantastic presentations and sessions this year. Below is a brief overview of the event and some links to the original site. There are also links to the presentation given by myself and the audio file so you can listen online, although you may prefer to watch the video from EUROCALL 2010 where I presented the same study.

Day One: 18th August 2010

Keynote: Ema Ushioda

Ema Ushioda is one of the big names in L2 Motivation research, having written several books and numerous articles on the subject. Her speech summarised the present state of L2 motivational theories, starting with Gardner and his work in defining Instrumental and Integrative orientations, and moving to Dörnyei (2009) and the L2 Motivational Self System He states that this theory “represents a major reformation” (ibid: 9) of previous L2 motivational theory because it incorporates theories of the self from mainstream psychological literature whilst maintaining the roots of previous L2 approaches. Ushioda contextualised these theories to CALL by stating that the way hyper-media and ICT have blurred the boundaries between cultures is especially significant to CALL and the L2 Motivational Self System attempts to accommodate this by allowing for a deeper understanding of the L2 self. Within this system the Ideal L2 self is predominantly defined as a “desire to reduce the discrepancy between our actual and ideal selves” (ibid: 29) and as such incorporates both integrative and internalised instrumental components of motivation. In contrast, the Ought to L2 self has a focus on avoiding negative outcomes, such as failure or embarrassment or being able to meet with social expectations. Dörnyei argues that “the self approach allows us to think BIG” (ibid: 39) and as such it has the flexibility to approach a multicultural and globalised view of L2 motivation which is necessary for understanding motivations for using CALL.

The question of when to use, and equally as important – when not to use, technology in class has been a question that sadly gets left out of many of the discussions around new learning technologies. Unfortunately, a lot of the choices about tech in class come from a top down implementation. So, your school gets a load of new interactive whiteboards. They give you a 1 hour training session, remove all the old whiteboards and say ‘off you go then’. Questioning their practicality often gets you branded as ‘negative’ or even ‘anti-progressive’.
Happily, there are those who dare to ask questions about this approach to instructional technology. People like Mike Levy, Phil Hubbard and Greg Kessler (among others) have voiced their concern over ‘tech for tech’s sake’ and this is coming from the leading CALL experts and advocators. Interactive whiteboards, for example, don’t do things that normal ones do. You can’t have more than one person writing on it at the same time, for example, so if you are doing a spelling race or something like that you won’t be able to use it. A lot of great software and apps are being released at an amazing rate, but all too often they are put into use without prior evaluation. As CALL practitioners we need to ask ourselves, is this useful? How so? When would this be useful and when would it not? These questions are not dissimilar to the questions teachers ask themselves when planning or evaluating any resource for a lesson. You don’t need to be an expert to conduct this kind of evaluation either.

A good example is a Blended Learning Lesson Plan I wrote myself for use in my institution. I was thinking about this lesson from a very top-down perspective, I’m sorry to say. I was concerned our Moodle forums were underused, so I thought ‘how can I get these forums to be used in class?’ I created a lesson plan where the whole class is taken into the computer room and forced to use the forum to post a response to something.
Not only did this only mean that forums were used a lot for the hour of the class and then never again, it was also questionable pedagogically. Why make people communicate over a forum when they are in the same room as each other? In the pecking order of communication, face to face is always best.

Forums are powerful collaboration tools, but the point is to allow asynchronous sharing and knowledge. The same lesson applied to learners who are in a separated by time and space would be great, but not if they could just have easily have actually spoken to each other.
We are at a stage now where technology is so ubiquitous that we are not always so keen to implement it for its own sake. We need to critically evaluate the new item, see if it works, decide what it is good for and what it is not so good for.

I woul like to invite you to post your comments about any new piece of technology you have used in class. Was it useful? What can it do well? What are its limitations?

How many of us are now using VLEs to provide students with access to supplementary resources, lecture notes, additional or useful information and links to other repositories?

Many university level lecturing jobs and teaching posts are asking for experience with eLearning. This page aims to provide a forum for discussions about how best to use these resources for Language Teaching.

Free Digital eprints of my articles (for those who don't get institutional access) Re-learning from experience: using autoethnography for teacher development http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09650792.2017.1310665#.WmrhnFoVY_M.twitter …